


raise a glass to freedom

by fairkidforever



Series: a million things I haven't done [4]
Category: Animorphs - Katherine A. Applegate
Genre: Cassie POV, F/M, Jake Berenson is so bad at feelings, M/M, Post-War, these kids are never happy, these traumatized children, weighty moral issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-30
Updated: 2016-10-30
Packaged: 2018-08-27 21:31:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,913
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8417599
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fairkidforever/pseuds/fairkidforever
Summary: Every now and then, after the trial, Marco throws a party and invites all the remaining Animorphs and their families. It's about as much fun as you'd expect.
Much lighter on the Ax/Marco than other fics in this series, much heavier on group dynamics and Marco's friends gossiping about him like the teenagers they actually are.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> "I could not ask you where you came from / I could not ask you, neither could you / Honey, just put your sweet lips on my lips / We could just kiss like real people do." Written to the sounds of ["Like Real People Do"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrleydRwWms) by Hozier.
> 
> Look, this fic is just weighty and melancholy and mostly Cassie speculating about how the other Animorphs and their families are coping but I promise there will be less sad, more fun Ax/Marco in this series in the future.

Marco might have saved all of our sorry butts from media circus hell on a weekly basis, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t incredibly annoying as a friend. My phone started ringing ten minutes before class let out – not my normal phone, my security phone that only the White House Chief of Staff, the UN Secretary, Toby Hamee, and my parents have the number for – and I bolted out of my vertebrate structure lab in a blind panic. “What’s going on? Report,” I barked.

“Geez, Cassie, ever consider switching to decaf?” Marco drawled on the other end of the line.

An exasperating mixture of relief, affection, and irritation flooded my chest. “Marco, you scared the living daylights out of me. This phone is only for emergencies.”

“No, this phone is only for VIPs, which we both happen to be,” Marco said. “You never texted me back.”

“My regular phone doesn’t get text messages,” I said.

I could hear the pitying disbelief on the other side of the line before he even opened his mouth. “Your phone doesn’t get text messages…?” Okay, so irritation was winning out over relief and affection. “Remind me to get you a new phone.”

“I like it this way,” I said, ignoring a scoff on the other end of the line. “What did you want to talk to me about? I’m supposed to be in class right now.”

“You just exist to make the rest of us feel inadequate, do you know that?” Marco asked. “Are you doing this whole ‘school’ thing to show me up? Me personally?”

“Marco, I want to be a veterinarian one day,” I said, trying to keep my voice somewhat serious. It was weird how quickly we fell back into the routine of banter and joking around. I felt like I was fifteen again. I almost felt like suggesting we acquire a morph that I knew Marco’d hate, just to see if he took it in stride.

“Yeah, and I want to find meaning in my vapid celebrity lifestyle,” Marco said. “All I’m saying is, there’s a reason you gave the commencement address at all the Ivies plus Oxbridge plus Stanford and the only voicemails in my inbox are from Saturday Night Live.”

“You were great on SNL last month!” I said. “The head ranger at Yellowstone showed me a clip.”

“You didn’t watch the whole show?” Marco asked, sounding incredulous. “You wound me, Cassie.”

One of my classmates poked her head out the door – probably to check to see if the world was ending – and I flashed her a smile and a thumbs up. She disappeared back into the classroom. She was probably just trying to be polite, and I figured she was a nice person – she would have to be, since my classmates had to be vetted by the Secret Service to make sure that they weren't Symbiotes, ultra-humanists, or Earth-Firsters who might try to kill me – but all the sudden I felt self-conscious. I didn’t mean to disrupt the class but some days it felt like if I took a bathroom break outside of my schedule it would cause a campus lockdown.

“Was there a reason you called?” I asked. I was starting to get the sense that Marco was buttering me up. “And on the emergency line?”

“I wanted to make sure you were coming to the family dinner,” Marco said. “The whole gang’s going to be there. Me, my mom and dad, Loren, Naomi and the kids…”

“Those ‘kids’ are almost in college, Marco,” I said. “Jordan is graduating in May. She’s only a couple of years younger than Ra—than us.”

Marco kept going like I hadn’t said anything. “Your parents are coming, too, although they apparently forgot to tell you…” he let his voice trail off. I rolled my eyes. I knew he was doing this on purpose but I was way over this game. Marco seemed to sense my annoyance through the phone and added, “And Steve and Jean and Jake are coming too.”

“Well, I wouldn’t have missed it, regardless,” I said. And that was true. I made a point to see Naomi and the kids every now and then – I felt like it was my responsibility to Jordan and Sara, if nothing else – but Marco was really the only one who had the charm and social capital to get even a few of the remaining Animorphs and their families in one room and not make it feel like a funeral or a tribunal. It was worth going for that. It would have been worth going just to be there for Loren, who’d lost her son and her husband each twice but couldstill light up if you got her in a one-on-one conversation about the World Series or Z-space technology or the seeing eye puppies she was raising. I would have gone no matter what, because it was my duty to support and be supported by those of us who still showed up every time there was an occasion.

But still. Certain people didn’t always show. So.

“When is it?” I asked.

“Tonight at six,” Marco said.

“Tonight?!” I exclaimed. The classmate from earlier looked out from behind the door again. “Marco, it’s four-thirty now! I'm still on campus! How am I supposed to get out to Santa Barbara in an hour and a half?”

Marco put on a fake-spooky voice that I suspected was supposed to be the Ellimist, although the Ellimist didn’t have a British accent. “You’re an Animorph, Cassie,” he said. “Use the power.” Then he hung up.

I stood stock-still for a minute, mastering an impulse to throw this very expensive cell phone down the hallway. There were a lot of reasons why I should just stay in tonight. I had a big exam in vert structure in a week. Marco could have just called me last week like a normal person so that I could have planned in advance. If I had known I was going to a party tonight, I would have worn something nicer… Alright, maybe I wouldn’t have, but at least I would have made some zucchini bread or something.

I fished my real phone out of my backpack and dialed my home phone. “Hey Mom, it’s me,” I said. “I guess you haven’t left yet for the family dinner?”

“We’re leaving in a few minutes,” my mom said. She sounded frazzled. She was probably ironing my dad’s slacks and making a salad at the same time while he did rounds in the barn. “Your father is running late.”

“I just found out about it. Can you grab a blouse for me and bring it so that I can change when I get there? A nice one? And maybe pick up a bottle of wine or a cake or something on your way there? I’ll pay you back.”

The din of the flurry of motion on the other end of the line died down for a moment. “Honey, don’t worry about it,” my mom said. “This one is on us. Fly safe, okay?”

“You got it,” I said. We exchanged goodbyes and she hung up. Class was starting to let out, so I dashed back in the classroom and grabbed my books and papers and started peeling off my jacket as I dashed out of the room. It was a good thing I was wearing a pair of slip-on canvas shoes that I could morph in or I would be hanging out at the party barefoot.

Jacqueline, the Secret Service detail that everyone insisted follow me around between class and work, was waiting outside with an SUV. “Hey, last-minute change of plan,” I said, hopping in the front seat. I knew security-wise, it was better to be in the back, but it made me feel like a kid getting picked up from pre-school. “I’m flying out to Montecito on feather power tonight. Can you take my books back to my office?”

If Jacqueline was surprised, she didn’t show it. “Of course,” she said. “Let’s just get a few blocks away before you exit the vehicle in morph.” She hit a button by the dashboard and the tint on the windows darkened.

 I thought that was overdoing it a little but I wasn’t going to argue with her about it. I started morphing osprey, and by the time we were off campus, she opened the sunroof and I was gone.

\---


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> big thanks to [Cavatica](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Cavatica/pseuds/Cavatica) for reading this chapter! Your enthusiasm was a huge encouragement and your insightful commentary strengthened this scene a ton.

Even though I was still a little annoyed with Marco for letting me be the last to know this was happening and acting like a jerk earlier, the dinner was still really great. My mom and dad got there before I did so that I didn’t have to hang out in my scrubs waiting for them to arrive to bail me out. Jean and Naomi took turns fussing over how tall I’d gotten and asking me a bunch of questions about school and the Hork-Bajir colony. Jordan and Sara weren’t the carefree little girls they’d been before the war, but they still had it in them to make a lot of noise and laugh and push each other into the pool. Eva and Peter both had gotten really into cooking after living on canned goods towards the end of the war, so the enormous Tex-Mex barbecue banquet that they had prepared was amazing. Even the weather was perfect, a velvety night with a half moon and clear skies.

Of course, it turned out that Jake had made a last-minute excuse not to come, but you win some, you lose some.

When we sat down to eat, Loren offered the customary toast. “To everyone who’s missing,” she said, raising her glass, her soft voice carrying over the deck. We observed a moment of silence that felt like an eternity. Then she looked around the table. “To everyone who’s here.”

Marco started telling jokes and Eva and Steve started serving the entrée and passing around plates while Peter poured drinks. I let the conversation wash over me, feeling lighter and more peaceful than I had in weeks. There was something very powerful about acknowledging the ghosts and the absences without making them the center of our lives.

Halfway through the nachos con queso, I was listening to my parents and Steve swap stories about vet school and med school when that peaceful feeling dissipated. “Wasn’t Jake supposed to come to this?” Sara whispered to Jordan, who was sitting next me.

“Oh my god, Sara, shut up before somebody hears you,” Jordan said, shooting a glance over her shoulder my way.

I sighed inwardly. I didn’t want everyone acting like I was about to go to pieces over Jake at every possible opportunity. Sure, it would have been nice to see him, but he’d apparently gotten the invite and decided not to come. It hurt to know that there was something keeping him from being a part of this circle of survivors, but I couldn’t keep him from isolating himself. God knows Marco and I had pretty much tried everything to get him to start living his life again.

The least I could do was play it off so that Sara and Jordan didn’t spend the rest of the night walking on eggshells. I put on my best Rachel swagger and pretended to flip my hair. “Men,” I said. “So unreliable.”

Sara and Jordan started giggling at my fake bravado and the conversation shifted to whether or not their dad was coming to California for Christmas. I breathed easier and went over to the cooler of drinks by the back door to get myself another soda. Marco was busy shaking a bag of ice into the chest. “Take your pick,” Marco said, stepping out of the way. “We’ve got Coke products since I signed that promotional deal, some weird speciality sodas that my dad likes, all this dumb Goya stuff that my mom won’t stop drinking because apparently they didn’t have any on the Anati homeworld…” he rolled his eyes and I felt a fresh stab of pity for what Eva had been through. I shot a look over to Eva. She was telling a very animated story to my mom and Jean, both of whom were hanging on her every word.

“Don’t start feeling too bad for her, now,” Marco cautioned. “She’ll just kick your butt. My mom doesn’t really do ‘sympathy’ well.”

So that’s where Marco got it from. “Point taken,” I said, grabbing a root beer out from under the heap of ice. “So, when is Ax getting into town?”

For a second, I caught a flash of the cold analytical fire in Marco’s eyes, his brain hopping into to overdrive to figure out how I’d known that. It disappeared almost instantly under his carefully-cultivated, media-friendly persona. “What makes you think we’re due for a visit from the premier goodwill ambassador?” he asked.

“You haven’t been on your phone every two minutes,” I said. “You text constantly when you’re seeing someone, which is always, but somehow you’re always magically single whenever Ax is on Earth. If he was here already, you’d invite him to this dinner. So I have to assume he’s on his way.”

Marco grinned, and I couldn’t tell if he was genuinely impressed or secretly fuming at being read. It could definitely be both. “Cassie, remind me not to underestimate you,” he said. “Am I that transparent? Don't spare my feelings.”

I smiled, trying to keep it light. “Nah, I just know how you operate.”

“Well, either way, you’re right. Ax is probably getting into orbit tomorrow,” Marco said. “Just a routine diplomatic mission. Apparently the Andalites are trying to decide in which order they want to trade Z-space transmitters for Pizza Hut and Dome ship environmental cyclers for Krispy Kreme. It's very important and necessitates a month of his time, evidently.”

“Nice to know we have so much to offer the universe,” I said.

“Well, all that stock I bought in Cinnabon with my very first corporate sponsorship sure paid off,” Marco said with a laugh. “And I haven’t gone to jail for insider trading yet.”

“And you probably never will."

Marco’s expression grew serious. “Isn’t that kind of messed up, Cassie?”

“What do you mean?”

“You were always good with the ethical questions,” Marco said. “Isn’t it a little disturbing how much political power we have these days? I could buy Pizza Hut and Krispy Kreme tonight with a hot tip from the Andalite diplomat with whom I have a strictly unprofessional relationship and the SEC would probably hand me a medal. I never graduated high school but I have enough honorary degrees to wallpaper my living room. Hell, we’re eighteen years old and the president calls us when she needs a favor. I’m not complaining - limitless wealth and power has kind of been, like, a lifelong aspiration of mine - but doesn’t this all feel a little…”

“Fake?” I suggested.

“Unreal,” Marco said. “It’s an important distinction. As in, too good to be true. As in, what goes up must come down. As in, Furby market crash-”

I felt like this line of metaphor might go on for a while. “I wish I knew,” I said. “I mean, we basically saved the world at sixteen. That’s the definition of ‘peaked in high school.’”

“Cassie, tell the truth and shame the devil,” Marco said, rolling his eyes. “There’s no ‘basically’ in that sentence. We did save the world at sixteen. Then we dismantled the evil empire from the ground up. And then we put the guy who was trying to take over the world on trial. And then we figured out a way for our allies to live in peace with us and one another. And now what? We do special effects for the Animorphs movie sequels? Teach morphing like Jake? Doesn’t everything from here on out feel kind of low-stakes?”

“I don't feel that way," I said. "There’s still plenty of work to be done."

“I guess that’s the difference between you and me, Cassie,” Marco said, a little sadly. “You always wanted to save the world on some level, didn’t you?”

I frowned. “Not really.”

“Oh, not like the way we actually ended up having to do it,” Marco said. “I know guerrilla warfare was never your style. But now you have the platform to actually do what you cared about in the first place, saving the whales and the rainforest and all that. You know. Like in the Princess Diaries. You’re Mia’s friend. The ‘Shut Up and Listen’ girl.”

“Does that make you Anne Hathaway?” I asked.

“No,” Marco said.

“Julie Andrews?”

“No way.”

“Oh!” I said. “You’re the nerdy pizza delivery guy who likes Anne Hathaway!”

“Okay, this was a flawed metaphor,” Marco said, throwing his hands in the air in exasperation. “You’re living a life of substance in a world that feels increasingly insubstantial. That’s all I’m saying.”

“Thanks, Marco,” I said. “That’s awfully candid of you.”

“All the Animorphs family quality time is making my brain mushy,” Marco said with a dark look at the rest of the table. I had to laugh. He acted like he hadn’t planned this whole event. “You know, I actually thought Ax was going to arrive earlier today. I never would have planned a family dinner for a weeknight otherwise. That’s why my mom and dad made so much food. Keep the customer satisfied, you know?”

I had a sudden, vivid image of the two of them lounging around in some romantic venue and Marco feeding Ax Slim Jims, Count Chocula and straight Tabasco sauce. For all I knew it had probably happened. Afterwards, Marco probably invoiced the Andalite consulate for his time in focus group testing and market research. I muffled a laugh.

Marco’s phone rang. “Sorry, Cassie, I gotta take this,” he said, looking at the caller ID and springing into action. He jumped to his feet and started pacing. “Hey, Barolan, what’s happening, my man?” He wandered out of earshot in the direction of the front door.

“What is all that about?” asked a voice behind me.

I jumped about a mile. “Jake?” I asked, swinging around. “What are you doing here?”

“There was a bad accident on the freeway,” he said. He leaned against the frame of the backdoor. “Traffic was stop-and-go from downtown to Parma Park.” He paused and smiled halfheartedly. “Nice to see you too.”

There were a couple of holes in this story, one being that no amount of traffic could make you two and a half hours late from his house to Marco’s, the other being that if he wanted to, he could have morphed owl and been here in half an hour. But I figured it was better not to push it. I didn’t want to make him think that we weren’t happy that he was here, even if his excuse for being so late was paper-thin. He'd probably just spent all evening deciding whether or not he wanted to show.

“Glad you could make it,” I said. “Do you want to say hi to everybody?”

“Nah,” Jake said, looking down at his hands. “I don’t want to make a big scene.”

“Okay,” I said. Jake was acting weird enough that I was a little worried about him, but he looked like he was doing okay. He was dressed pretty sharply for the occasion and he’d clearly been taking at least decent care of himself – his hair was combed neatly, his coloring was healthy, and he seemed alert and present. There were faint circles under his eyes, but that was pretty much par for the course for all of us.

“How are your classes going?” I asked, figuring work was a pretty safe question. He’d been teaching morphing seminars for elite antiterrorism agents for the last few months and from what I’d heard, it was going okay. I’d even given a guest lecture at one of them.

“Pretty well, I guess,” Jake said with a shrug. “I can’t get them to stop calling me ‘Professor’, though.”

“Yeah, I hear that’s a problem for teachers all over the world these days,” I said.

Jake smiled for a second, and for the second before the smile became self-deprecating, I thought that it would have been worth coming up here just for that. “I actually wanted to talk to you about something,” he said. “I got asked to teach a workshop at a counterinsurgency conference in Georgia next month, separate from the morphing classes. It doesn’t have anything to do with Andalite technology - more like the psychology of anonymity in guerrilla warfare or something like that. The ask came from pretty high up. Not all the way up, but high enough to make me think twice about turning it down.”

“But?” I asked.

“Most of the attendees of the conference won’t be counterterrorism experts specializing in anti-alien terrorism, like the people in my morphing seminars. They’re going to be military experts from all around the world.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’m still not sure why you seem so uneasy about this offer.”

“The place where they’re asking me to speak is pretty notorious for teaching ethically-questionable methods.”

“Such as?”

“Well, torture, for one,” Jake said. His voice went flat and all the sudden he looked much older. “They’ve gotten a lot of negative attention from human rights activists in the past because a lot of the graduates from the school have gone on to stage coups and become military dictators in other countries."

"Oh, lord," I said. I had never been as up-to-date on international political issues as I had with environmental topics, even before the war, but I knew that none of that sounded like anything Jake wanted to be involved in. He probably felt bad about the fact that they'd even singled him out as a possible candidate to give a lecture.

"Of course, the US government denies any wrongdoing.”

“Sure,” I said.

He lowered his voice. “But Marco’s mom is from one of those countries. That’s why she had to come here in the first place. She was a refugee.”

“I don’t think you should work with these guys, Jake,” I said. “You don’t need me to tell you that.”

“I’m going to turn them down,” Jake said. “To be honest, ethical dilemma aside, I’d be more afraid of Eva’s reaction if I said yes than I am of their reaction if I say no.”

“Good,” I said. “You don’t need that hanging over you.” Jake already had enough baggage when it came to the epithet of ‘war criminal’ is it is.

“But here’s the thing I do worry about,” Jake said. “No matter what I do, this could get real political real fast if word got around that I turned them down because I didn’t approve of what they were doing. If I throw my weight behind a cause as Jake Berenson, leader of the Animorphs, all the sudden, it becomes political suicide to oppose that cause.”

“Which is why you’ve been keeping a low profile when it comes to politics,” I said. “Marco keeps the media at bay, I do the political legwork to make sure that justice is done by the Hork-Bajir and nothlit Taxxons and Yeerks, and you try to stay out of the public eye. That was what you, Marco and I agreed was best to keep from disrupting the normal democratic process with a bad case of George Washington Syndrome.”

“Yeah, and I still agree with that,” Jake said. “It's not my place to play god, if I use this heavyweight political influence for a just cause now, what’s to stop me or someone else from using that influence for an unjust cause in the future, and so on. I know all the arguments, and I respect them. But doing nothing when I’m so sure that the people in charge are being immoral just feels wrong. I didn’t fight to keep humankind free from the Yeerks so that us humans could plot and scheme deny one another their liberties.”

I sighed. “It never gets any easier, does it?”

“I guess not,” Jake said. “But it was always harder for me to do the right thing than it was for you.”

I opened my mouth to disagree but Marco burst through the patio doors at that exact moment. “And now, ladies and gentlemen, the moment you’ve all been waiting for! Special Ambassador to planet Earth from a galaxy far, far away! War Prince of the Intrepid! Two-time People’s Magazine nominee for world’s hottest Andalite! I give you… Aximili-Esgarrouth-Isthill!”

Ax stumbled through the doorway in human morph, wearing the indigo uniform that the Andalite fleet had paid some lucky fashion designer zillions of dollars to put together so that the Andalite military looked presentable at press conferences. After such a dramatic buildup, Ax’s entrance was a little bit underwhelming, since he was in human morph and never seemed to feel fully confident on two feet. But you wouldn’t have guessed that from the thunderburst of excitement that greeted him when he walked into the room. Loren gave him a big hug, Peter clapped him on the back, and Eva kissed him on the cheek while Marco pretended to be embarrassed. My parents and Naomi shook his hand while Sara and Jordan immediately began plying him with appetizers.

“What a fanbase,” I said. “Ax is quite the charmer, huh?”

“I didn’t even know that he was in town,” Jake said, frowning.

“I think it was kind of last-minute,” I said.

Jake rolled his eyes and pulled a grimace. “Here we go again.”

“What’s wrong?”

“I tell you what’s going to happen,” Jake said. “It’s the same routine every time. The whole time that Ax is in town, I'm not going to hear from Marco at all. Then, magically, seventy-two hours after Ax ships out again, I’m gonna get a late night call from Marco, who’s going to be an emotional wreck. First, we’re going to have some long talks about Marco’s love life – by which I mean, Marco is going to talk to me and I’m going to sit quietly and say nothing – and then we’re going to play MarioKart and watch old horror movies for three days. Then Marco’s going to decide he’s over it and insist that we go to a basketball game and invite a bunch of celebrities who don’t know anything about the Lakers, who are going to ask a bunch of dumb questions throughout the whole game. Then Marco is going to rope me into going fancy nightclubs and movie openings with him for a week until he buys himself a new car to cheer himself up. Then I won't hear from him for two weeks and it'll be back to business as usual.”

I had to laugh at that image. “Does that happen every time he and Ax hook up?” I asked.

Jake made a long-suffering face. “Like clockwork. Cassie, you have no idea.”

“Maybe we ought to say something to Ax,” I suggested gently.

“Or maybe you could come with us to the next Lakers game,” Jake said, brightening up, flashing that smile that never looked quite right on his face. "At least you're from around here. Last time I tried to help Marco get over a breakup by going to a basketball game, he invited a bunch of producers from New York there and they cheered for the Knicks. We had courtside seats! I had to leave."

I looked back over at the knot of people gathered around Ax. “One of these days, somebody is going to have to tell Marco that it’s not cool to touch Ax’s butt in front of people and especially not in front of all our parents.”

Jake’s eyes widened. “Not it.”

“Hey, you’re his best friend, not me,” I pointed out.

He sighed. “Come on, let’s go say hi.”

I looked over the deck railing into the garage and whistled innocently. "Marco sure does have a lot of cars."

Jake grumbled, "I'm gonna see if the Andalite fleet can just assign Ax to Earth before Marco throws the auto industry into chaos."

We made our way over to Ax, who managed to disentangle himself from the crowd of people waiting for him to try churros for the first time and give us both big hugs. It was funny how much less restrained he was in human morph. Ax was a big-time diplomat and war-prince but apparently he wasn't too self-important to nearly fall over trying to reach down to give me a hug. "Prince Jake! Cassie! I am delighted to see you face-to-face. Faaay-suh. Fay-suh."

"It's good to see you too, Ax," I said. "Are we interrupting something? It looks like we're standing in the way of you and a pastry."

"Your thoughtfulness is considerate," Ax said. "But I am willing postpone eating this brown, viscid stick for several minutes in order to exchange greetings and typical pleasantries." He turned to Jake.

Jake shrugged with a self-deprecating smile. "As you were, Prince Aximili."

Without further hesitation, Ax balled up the entire churro - tinfoil and all - and shoved in it his the side of his mouth, prompting a round of toasts from the parents, shrieks of surprise from the girls, and a whoop from Marco. I exchanged looks with Jake and we both tried not to laugh. _To everyone who's missing_ , I thought. _And to everyone who's here._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> these babies do nothing but think about weighty moral questions and mourn their fallen friends all the livelong day.
> 
> I personally headcanon Eva as Guatemalan, since the timeline fits so nicely (she probably came to the US as an adult if Marco gets emotional about citizenship oaths and naturalization being a decision that you make in #20, so she could have immigrated during the height of the internal armed conflict in Guatemala in the 80's) and you kinda get the feeling that like, this isn't Eva's first rodeo when she and Peter are camped out in the Hork-Bajir valley, but [this ancient ff.net fic called 'Home for Dinner and Weekends'](https://www.fanfiction.net/s/6036674/7/Home-for-Dinner-and-Weekends) implies that Eva is Chilean, which I also like and think makes sense timeline-wise, so I was nonspecific. Either way, the very real [School of the Americas](http://soaw.org/about-the-soawhinsec/what-is-the-soawhinsec) trained high-ranking officials and intelligence agents in the military dictatorships of both Guatemala and Chile in the late 20th century, so it checks out either way. A lot of this fic was me trying to work out why exactly the idea of Jake teaching counterterrorism morphing seminars after the war feels so shady to me. Thanks for indulging me.


End file.
